May 24, 2017 Published ~ 2 years ago.

Enlarge/ Just imagine how many 20-minute Game of Thrones episodes you could watch if you lived as long as Melisandre. (credit: HBO)

As AT&T prepares to purchase Time Warner Inc., AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson has an idea for HBO’s Game of Thrones: cut the hour-long episodes down to 20 minutes for mobile devices.

AT&T’s $85.4 billion purchase of Time Warner would give the telco HBO and other lucrative programming properties. Stephenson discussed his thoughts yesterday at the annual JP Morgan Technology, Media, and Telecom conference in Boston.

“I’ll cause [HBO CEO Richard] Plepler to panic,” Stephenson said. But “think about things like Game of Thrones. In a mobile environment, a 60-minute episode might not be the best experience. Maybe you want a 20-minute episode.” Instead of showing full-length episodes on all devices, it might be best to “curate the content uniquely for a mobile environment.”

May 24, 2017 Published ~ 2 years ago.

Margaret Sullivan, The Washington Post’s media columnist, is right to upset about these developments:

Infowars, that cesspool of destructive conspiracy theories, on Monday received a temporary credential to attend White House press briefings….

In the past, please recall, what constituted “news” at Infowars included the following: that 9/11 was planned and executed by the U.S. government; that President Obama was not an American citizen; and that the massacre of small children at Connecticut’s Sandy Hook Elementary School was a hoax carried out by actors.

Infowars’ inclusion (even if only temporarily) in the White House press corps is disgusting.

But no more disgusting than the lies that Fox News continues to spread about Seth Rich, a 27-year-old man who was shot dead last summer in Washington.

To hear Fox’s Sean Hannity tell it, this was an inside job by the Democratic National Committee, where Rich worked: retribution by the Hillary Clinton camp for his sharing insider emails with WikiLeaks.

May 24, 2017 Published ~ 2 years ago.

The inbox is the center of everything. Whether it’s email, assignments, messaging, chatting, IM, whatever, if someone wants you to see something, it shows up in an inbox of some kind.

The design of the inbox has more impact on our daily decision making than any other part of any piece of software we use. It’s fucking important.

If you use a group chat tool like Slack, HipChat, Microsoft Teams, or something similar, your inbox — and, therefore, your day — is filled with mysteries, secrets, and “Whats?”. You’re probably so numb to it that you don’t realize how much of your time and attention is being wasted.

“To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.” -George Orwell

You’re stumbling around in the dark all day long because of a simple design pattern. The pattern is core to group chat, no matter the tool. It’s a fundamental flaw of the medium hidden in plain sight.

The inbox in the sidebar of Slack, Hipchat, and Microsoft Teams is stacked with rows like this:

There’s a category, room, or channel name on the left and an unread indicator on the right. But wait, what’s that 28 mean?

28 what? 28 things I have to see? 28 things I could see? How many of those things matter to me? Are any of them relevant? The category attached to the number is so broad, that anything, everything, or nothing important could be hiding behind the number.

If you use a group chat tool, there’s only one way to find out if the unread number is relevant: You have to click through and read everything just to figure out if there was anything worth reading. That’s the very definition of wasting time. Doing work to see if there’s work to do.

This design lacks context. General categories are too roomy to provide specific context, and specific context is what we use to determine if something’s worth digging into or not. Without it, we’re unable to use our time wisely. An absence of detail wastes our attention.

4 of those lines could have been jokes. 9 of them mildly interesting anecdotes. 3 of them relevant to you. 8 of them random observations. And 4 questions and followups that didn’t pertain to you. Or some other combination. Maybe all 28 were completely unrelated to anything you’re working on, even if 34 things earlier were. Who’s to know when all you have to go on is a number?

Surely not every single thing said in #design or #general or #marketing or #engineering or #projectname is relevant to you. And if it is — if you have to follow along with hundreds or thousands of individual lines a day — communication problems across your company run deep.

And that’s just one room/channel. Add in a few more, and you start to run into big numbers of unknowns, lot of whats?

I got 99 problems, and maybe these are some of them? Or not?

Making matters worse, if you’re like most people, your sidebar lists a whole lot more than just 3 rooms/channels. Many people keep a dozen or more up there. Multiply that by dozens or hundreds of people at a company, and you can only imagine how much time, money, and attention is being wasted every day. You’re paying for software that makes people do extra work just to see if there’s any real work worth doing.

We took a different approach with Basecamp 3

When we set out to design Basecamp 3, we put people’s time and attention at the center. Everything that matters must be surrounded with context and detail that gives you the information you need to make good decisions about how you spend individual moments throughout your day.

In Basecamp 3, there’s no sidebar that’s constantly pulling your attention away and to the left. Instead, there’s a menu at the top called Hey! When you choose to pull that menu down, revealing what’s inside, you’ll see rows that look like this:

This design is full of context. Each row gives you the who, the kind of thing (an @mention, a to-do you’ve been assigned, a to-do that’s been completed, a comment, a new document, a new message, etc), the specific subject/topic that’s relevant to the discussion, which project or team it relates to, and when it happened.

Here’s my actual Hey! menu right now:

The context and detail above helps me know, act, or dismiss. A lack of context forces me to guess.

At a quick glance, I can see who’s said/done the most recent thing in each thread. I can judge relevance and timeliness. For example, I’m not working on the Business Cards stuff day-to-day, so I can ignore that one at the moment, but there’s a Highrise Board Meeting coming up shortly, and because Lynette, the Highrise COO posted something, then it’s important that I check that out. I can also see that Scott completed a to-do that I assigned to him. And that Zach @mentioned me in a conversation on a to-do about the Clientside feature we’re working on.

The Basecamp 3 Hey! menu is full of context. It lets me scan without committing. I’m informed simply by looking at it. I can jump in selectively and make my own decisions how to spend my attention because all the information is in front of me. I can pull it down, glance, and step right back out. When things are out of the way in a menu I can decide to get to them later.

Contrast that with the group chat style sidebar where I only have a scant, general idea what I’m jumping into. At a glance I can’t really tell if there’s anything behind the curtain that’s worth my time right now. So I have to go look at everything. What a distraction. The fact that you can’t know what’s behind the number actually entices you to waste time finding out. It’s a dark pattern.

This adds up

We tend to judge how things affect us personally. But when you’re using a group tool with others, the effects are wide ranging. If you’re wasting 15 minutes every hour peering through irrelevant chat logs and getting inadvertently pulled into unnecessary conversations, imagine all the other people at your company doing the same thing. Every hour. Every day. 1500 minutes wasted every hour? More? Quantify the waste. Bad design adds up.

So stop. Take note. Pay attention to how often you have to jump in to determine if jumping in was worth it. How often you have to read everything to see if there was anything worth reading. How many times you’re pulled away by secrets and mysteries in your inbox. If you start counting, you’ll be surprised how high the number goes.

Stop your day from feeling like this

Your time is too valuable to put up with this.

Tired of wasting your time and energy on the chat treadmill? Graduate from group chat to Basecamp 3. It’s the calmer, saner way to work. Stop spinning your wheels or running in place — Basecamp 3 helps you get traction with new projects. Since switching to Basecamp 3, 89% of our customers have a better handle on their business, 84% report more self-sufficient teams, and more than half save over 10 hours of busywork a month. Give it a try, for free.

May 24, 2017 Published ~ 2 years ago.

As we recently noted, more than 40% of the 2.5 million comments filed with the FCC on net neutrality are entirely fake. The comments, which oppose net neutrality, have been posted using a bot that’s pulling the names used from a hacked database of some kind. When the people that own the actual names behind these comments have been contacted by the media, many have stated they didn’t make the comments, and/or have no idea what net neutrality even is.

In an ideal world, the FCC would easily parse out these obviously fraudulent, duplicate comments and shore up the abuse of its API. But because these comments support the current FCC’s belief that meaningful net neutrality protections are somehow an assault on “American freedom,” the FCC appears poised to completely disregard the fact that a malicious actor is manipulating the FCC’s systems. The FCC isn’t candidly admitting this, but FCC boss Ajit Pai’s non-statements and statements alike so far indicate he’s inclined to include the obviously fraudulent comments:

“The FCC didn’t respond to repeated requests to specifically say whether it would filter out the astroturfed comments. Speaking to reporters after announcing a step toward rolling back existing net neutrality protections, FCC Chair Ajit Pai admitted “a tension between having an open process where it’s easy to comment and preventing questionable comments from being filed.”
“Generally speaking, this agency has erred on the side of openness,” he said.”

When pushed, FCC officials have said they’ll purge comments made under obviously phony names, but isn’t willing to comment further on the obvious blind eye to manipulation of the comment system:

“Pai said the agency wouldn’t consider comments with obviously fake names, like Wonder Woman and Joseph Stalin, but declined to go further. Reached for comment after Pai’s statement, an FCC official declined to comment specifically on astroturfed comments.
“You heard his answer on erring on the side of inclusion,” the official said.

And again, the FCC is turning a blind eye to this fraudulent behavior because actual humans overwhelmingly oppose what Pai and friends are up to. Recent analysis of the comments made so far to the FCC indicate the vast, vast majority of consumers — across all political ideologies — don’t want the agency gutting meaningful oversight of the already uncompetitive broadband sector. That could be problematic later this year, when Pai faces inevitable lawsuits over his rush to kill the protections despite no corresponding market necessity, and the broad public support for the rules.

May 24, 2017 Published ~ 2 years ago.

There’s interestingresearch on using a set of “master” digital fingerprints to fool biometric readers. The work is theoretical at the moment, but they might be able to open about two-thirds of iPhones with these master prints.

May 24, 2017 Published ~ 2 years ago.

Recently, at my dayjob, I had a burning need to understand how scheduled tasks work. You see, we’ve recently switched from Adobe Coldfusion to Lucee, and I was shaky on how Adobe did things before, so I wanted a deeper understanding of how the code I was working on would be executed. For the uninitiated, Lucee is an open-source reimplementation of Cold Fusion. And that’s not the WTF.

It’s open source, I thought to myself. I’ll just take a look at the code.

I had one problem. Then I looked at the code. Now I have two problems … and a headache:

“So okay, if now is before or starting at—hang on, what’s calendar again?” I found myself muttering aloud. “Okay, if now is before or equal to the start date plus the start time, and time—which, if I understand that method correctly, is the elapsed time in the current day—is after or equal to the start time … when is that true exactly? You know what would be nice? Some #%#@$%@ Javadoc!”

This is only one representative method, and yet, there’s just so much here. Why an if statement that does nothing, terminating in an easily-overlooked semicolon? Why the misspelling of EVERY? Or “Intervall?” Why are the programmers allergic to spaces? Why can’t they name variables worth anything? Do I even really want to know how this works anymore?

If you want to witness the madness for yourself, may I remind you: this code is open source. Have at ye. According to the copyright statement at the top, this code was inherited from the Railo project, so if you’re in Switzerland, please be sure to send your hate mail to the right address.

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Open Internet proponents who have been fighting the Trump administration’s rollback of net neutrality protections, which has been enacted at the bidding of the telecom industry, said Tuesday that Comcast is now threatening legal action saying the website Comcastroturf.com is infringing on its trademark.

As the organization Fight for the Future quipped on Twitter, “You can’t make this stuff up.”

The website in question is currently providing a tool for the public to see if their names are among those stolen and used by anti-net neutrality bots to post comments in support of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) plan to undo Title II protections that classify the internet as a public utility.

The cease and desist order, dated last week, says the domain name is “confusingly similar to the [Comcast trademark] because it sounds the same, looks the same, and is spelled similarly to Comcast.”

The letter, signed by a cyber threat analyst at LookingGlass Cyber Security Center, instructs the domain holder, Fight for the Future, to “take all steps necessary to see that the domain name is assigned to Comcast,” and says that if the order is not immediately complied with then the cable giant will “pursu[e] its claims for damages.”

“This is exactly why we need Title II net neutrality protections that ban blocking, throttling, and censorship,” said Evan Greer, campaign director of Fight for the Future.

Greer pointed out that if FCC chairman Ajit Pai’s plan, advanced with a preliminary commission vote last week, “is enacted, there would be nothing preventing Comcast from simply blocking sites like Comcastroturf.com that are critical of their corporate policies.”

“It also makes you wonder what Comcast is so afraid of? Are their lobbying dollars funding the astroturfing effort flooding the FCC with fake comments that we are encouraging Internet users to investigate?” she asked.

Indeed, the fake comment scandal in addition to the FCC’s failure to process comments in favor of net neutrality drew sharp criticism in the wake of the FCC’s vote, and raised concern over how much influence the telecom industry holds over Pai, and now the FCC.

In case there was any question on that front, The Intercept’s Lee Fang and Nick Surgey reported on Tuesday on an internal email from GOP leadership instructing House Republicans on how best to defend the FCC’s decision.

Sent by Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.), chair of the House Republican Conference, the email contains a “nifty toolkit,” in her words, which the reporters discovered to have come “directly from the cable industry.”

“The metadata of the document shows it was created by Kerry Landon, the assistant director of industry grassroots at the National Cable and Telecommunications Association, a trade group that lobbies on behalf of Comcast, Cox Communications, Charter, and other cable industry companies,” Fang and Surgey report. “The document was shared with House Republican leaders via ‘Broadband for America,’ a nonprofit largely funded by the NCTA.”